How some of the unemployed lived in poverty - In 1935, a murder was committed amongst the poor of Hanham Woods, revealing living conditions that were reminiscent of squatters in the last century.
Local Hanham historian Dennis Gerrish, in conversation with Neil Hirst, explains why this happened:
Question: Can you tell me what you know about the murder of Mrs Nott?
Answer: In the 1930’s, there were various families living in the woods. There were two brothers by the name of Franklin whose origins were unknown. Living on the opposite side of the track was the Nott family a husband, wife and one son. And at one period, Mrs Nott moved to the Franklin brothers’ home.
Q: Do you know why?
A: No one knows why. It was a closed shop — no one interfered down there. Eventually Mrs Nott moved back with her husband. There ensued a row, and one day Frank Nott came across to see Franklin, who came out of his shack with a gun and fired at Nott, and knocked his eye out. Franklin went back into the hut and killed Mrs Nott. He was arrested and taken to Horfield Prison.
Q: How long after was he arrested?
A: Within a day, hours, within hours of it happening. He was eventually committed and sentenced to death, and was hanged at Gloucester Prison.
Q: Do you know anything about his trial?
A: Very little. It was in the paper, but we were boys and weren’t interested in the details. It just happened there, we all went down to see where it was, we knew the area but about the exact trial we don’t know. The strange thing was that during the war, Nott was still living in the same place, during the blitz of Bristol a stray German bomber on his way back to the south coast dropped a couple of bombs over the Hanham area, one landed on Nott's shack and blew it to pieces. He was working nights at St Annes Board Mills, but his son was there at the time. He wasn’t injured, he was blown out of the hut. It seems fate followed them right the way through. Eventually, the son was married and lived at Pucklechurch, and he was haymaking and he fell off the hay-mound and was killed.
Q: This is Nott’s son?
A: Yes, Nott’s son.
Q: Do you know what his name was?
A: Dennis. It appears the family was, well, just afflicted in some way or other. It was sensational, ‘cause Hanham at the time was only a tiny village, and for something like this to happen, it was just sensational. It was the talk of the village for weeks and weeks.
Q: Sightseers?
A: Oh yes. It was regular. They came out from Bristol. They walked down to see where all this had happened because Hanham was so quiet, nothing happened — anything as sensational as that.
Q: What effect do you think this had on the people of Hanham. Did they make up stories about it?
A: Oh well, imagination yes — one saw where it happened, and one saw the gun and, there was doubt about all this. At this time these people lived like hermits and nobody interfered with them. The Franklin brothers kept pigs — one went to Bristol every day to collect waste from the canteens and the other stopped there in the hut. Apart from that they never left that patch.
Q: Did they have a van?
A: Horse and cart. Nobody had a van in those days. They collected the waste — pig food — always one stopped on the site. They never went out together, they never went to the pub. They lived as hermits. There was perhaps a dozen or twenty families living like that.
Q: As many as that?
A: Yes.
Q: How did they get in the position of having to live in the woods?
A: Back in the 1930’s there was no public, assistance. A lot of them had worked in the shoe trade and probably worked two hours a day in the factory. And so their wages at the end of the week was ten or twelve shillings. So they were eventually turned out of where they were living for not paying the rent.
They were in debt and they just went to the woods and built a shack and lived there. It was a common thing for shoemakers at that period to go to the factory at six o’clock in the morning and the foreman came out and said 'nothing yet, come back at nine o’clock', and he said 'that’s all for today'. So you did an hour and half during the day and that’s all you got paid for.
Of course everybody was in poverty. There were so many in Kingswood of small shoe manufacturers, if you worked for those it was very poverty-stricken.
Q: What area of Hanharn did the Notts and the Franklins live in before they moved to the woods?
A: The Franklins, no one knows who they were or where they came from, or anything about them. They were lust a mystery. At one time it was suggested that they were brought there by some priests from the Catholic Church.
They were children that had arisen from somewhere, and they were put there and were given a living. Apart from that, nobody knew anything about them. The Notts as far as I knew came from the Bristol area. They moved out from Bristol. I don’t think they were local people.
On the top of Wood Hill there were families named Little, the Notts, Franklins, Tommy Robbins lived down below it. There was a bunch around what we call Couches Lane, there were several lots there. There was an old woman who lived down there we always knew as Rhoda. She was found dead one day, and that was suspicious but the police never pursued it. She was a recluse that lived down there and her death was a mystery really, but the police look for the easy way out I think.
Q: What about Franklin’s brother, what happened to him after the murder?
A: Eventually he committed suicide. In the back of where they were living there was a rain-filled quarry. ‘Cause there was no sewage, no water supply, no electric, no anything there. He stood on the edge of this pool and fired his gun.and fell back in the pool.
He was missed after a couple of days, a couple of the locals missed him. They informed the police and they found him in the pool. I think it took seven or ten days before they found the gun. It was eventually recovered by a fella named Bransome who lived in Tabernacle Road, using an electro magnet.
Q: Could you tell me about Dennis Nott?
A: He was a couple of years younger than me. He went to school with my brother. He came up from the woods every day, quite a number who lived in that area brought their food in a piece of paper, newspaper, and they ate it at school.
There was no school dinners, no facilities at all. It was a common thing to see them arrive at school about nine o’clock in bad weather and they would be soaked to the skin and they stopped in their clothes all day. In fact I can recollect once, they walked up from the riverside with their food, and when they got there it was so wet the teacher tried to dry it out on top of the radiator.
Many years later Dennis Nott the son left Hanham and got married to a Pucklechurch girl - he got a job on her father's farm - then one day while hay-making - he fell from the top of a large hat stack and broke his neck - he was dead on the spot - it seems the family were cursed.
Q: What sort of clothes did they wear?
A: Anything that was available. No school uniforms. They were wrapped up as well as people could manage. They were clean but they were poor. You know, it was anything they could scrape from anywhere.
Q: Clothes that were too big?
A: Oh yes. When I was at school, if someone had clothes that were too big for them, no one took any notice. At least it covered up his dignity.
Other reports testify to the poverty which was the setting for this tragic incident:
The two poor parts of Hanham were Ansteys Lane - the bottom end was poor, and the other was down behind the church, called Vicarage Road, and that was very poor. The kids from down there used to come to school with motor car tyres stuck to the soles of their shoes, you’d think they were on stilts. It was so poor, and the people were so poverty-stricken, that a certain family in Ansteys Lane took to the woods - Hanham Woods - and when the local coal pit closed down they took all the old rails and that and they built shacks, and went and lived in the woods.
The people down there were strange. They wore long gowns and had long hair all bedraggled like, you’d think they were in another world down there, it was all so strange and they never spoke to anyone down there. I never knew how they lived - they used to have seven or eight nanny goats on a piece of string - and that’s how they used to carry on.
The Trail and Execution of Arthur Franklin
In the presence of the County High Sheriff, a priest and Prison officials, Arthur Henry Franklin, the Hanham Abbotts murderer, paid the extreme penalty of the law for his crime at Gloucester Prison.
Stringent precautions had been taken to prevent any organised demonstrations; in view of her recent activities for the abolition of capital punishment, a rumour had spread through the City that Mrs Van der Elst would stage a protest outside the prison, but this was unfounded and no scenes occurred.
The story of the crime, as outlined by the prosecution at the trial, was that Franklin lived with his brother on a smallholding in Hanham Woods. The dead woman Mrs Nott, who lived with Franklin for a time, was the wife of Henry William Nott, another smallholder who lived 177 yards away from Franklin’s bungalow.
In November 1933 Gladys Nott left her husband and went to live with the accused as his wife in the bungalow. The Nott’s had a small boy, now aged about seven years; he used to visit the bungalow on Saturdays and Sundays for the purpose of being washed and bathed by his mother and having a hot meal.
Earlier in May of that year, Mrs Nott desired to return to her husband and arrangements were made for her to do so. On May 8th at about 10.00 am she started out to return. As she was walking towards her husband’s bungalow, Franklin shot her from behind with a single barrelled sports gun. He shot her twice, once when she was on the ground.
Nott was working in a field a little distance away and he heard his wife scream. He ran towards the spot and then heard two shots. He saw Franklin standing there with a gun in his hand. Franklin turned to him and said, 'And you too, you rat'. Nott ran into a shed and caught hold of a gun which he had there for the purpose of shooting rats and he intended to shoot at Franklin in his own defence.
Franklin however shot at him and wounded him in the eye and head. Franklin was heard to say he was going to play with Nott like a cat played with a mouse, but it happened that he had no more cartridges in the gun that he could fire, and at that moment two women, Mrs Dyer and Mrs Taylor came up and to them Franklin said 'I have shot Gladys and I have also put a shot into Mr Nott'. The Police were sent for and Franklin made ~similar statement to them.
A burly fair-headed man, Franklin listened stolidly and almost without interest to the brief proceedings in the Court and even when the Judge put on the black cap and sentenced him, showed no trace of emotion.
He had previously refused legal aid, although advised to accept it by the Judge, and his plea of guilty when charged was made in a firm voice.
The grim drama behind the high walls was quickly enacted and nine minutes after the mellow chimes of the Cathedral bells had announced the hour of execution, the prison doors opened and a Warder hung, on the massive entrance gates, the official notices that the sentence had been carried out.
It is understood that the executioner was Thomas W. Pierrepoint and his assistant was Robert Wade.
Excerpts from The Gloucester Journal 1935
